Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification, and instant messaging. When placing a call using SIP, Domain Name Servers provide a list of proxies to the phones and facilitate communication between SIP phones. Using the Domain Name Servers, the phone detects the unavailability of the proxy when a user tries to use the phone. Therefore, a phone can be unavailable for a period of time without the user realizing the unavailability. Detecting an outage may take considerable time and increase the amount of time the phone is unavailable. Furthermore, when the phone attempts to connect to a back up proxy because the original proxy has failed, the process takes additional time using the Domain Name Servers.